DEATH OF GAMBETTA.

Feilding Star, Volume III, Issue 58, 6 January 1883, Page 3

DEATH OF GAMBETTA.

A cable message on January Ist info;med us that Leon Gambetta, one of the most prominent French statesmen of modern times, ha.i succumbed to the serious illness from which he has been suffering for some weeks Born of a Genoese family at Cahors in 1838, Garabetta adopted the legal profession and became distinguished as a forensic orator of great ability. It was not until a year or two before the Franco-Prussian War, however, that he came to the front as a politi cian. Alre:idy the Second Empire was "tottering to its fall," anil in Gambetta it found a most able and pitiless assailant. In the b"o-innm» of 1870 he boldly announced that the day was at hand when a republic would be established in France. During the disastrous episodes of the Franco-Prussian war Gambetta became the one figure in the political world to whom the eye» of all France, if not of all Europe, were t- rned. His dramatic exit from beleaguered Paris in a balloon, his impassion, d appeals to the Provinces to make »■ war " a l'outrance " and drive out the hated Prussians, his succ« ssful organisation of the am y of the Loire, and the crushing defeat inflicted on his untrained volunteers by the German soldiery are fresh in the minds of every student of the history of that stirring time. After resigning the position which he practically held as Dictator of France, Gambetta retired to Spain in 1871, and lived there in strict seclusion for some months. In 1872, however, he again entered the French Assembly, where he held thr P' sition of leader of the Extreme Left. Since then bis public life has been comparatively un ventful, although he has always been a strong power in the state, and there has oeen no French statesman probably whose utterances have been looked torw ard to with more interest by the English public when any question of moment Arose,